The way Hotline Miami connects its ingredients is simply hypnotic, this game puts me in the zone. The story and the violence are actually horrible but you don't realize it too much while playing because the excellent soundtrack and the simple game mechanics with an instant retry after death get you so pumped and focused. Only when you've killed everyone the music stops and you have to return to your car through all that carnage you just inflicted moments ago.

I don't know. I just consider this game one of those perfect video games where everything works and each individual part compliments the others. An awful lot of replayability as well. Hotline Miami 2 had sadly lost much of the first one's magic and playing it felt way too often frustrating instead of fun and exhilarating or intense and exciting. The soundtrack was luckily still excellent in that as well.

Special shout-outs to my favourite songs in this one (though it really is all good):

I really like this game's story and aesthetic. The music really adds to the weird, almost twisted tone that the game has, which I love. The gameplay is also pretty fun, and I like how it's almost a puzzle game in that you have to find the right solution , AKA proper order of killing people, to succeed.

All that said, the amount of stress this game caused me resulted in a heavy sigh of relief once I beat it. Too heavy to make my list, unfortunately.

Never has an unfinished game been so fun. It's pretty much GTA but in China with a much bigger emphasis on melee combat. The story is great, taking a few surprising twists and turns (though the ending is kind of dissatisfying), and the traversal is quite fun. Don't skip it.

I played this and liked it (didn't finish it though admittedly) but I guess it didn't register enough for me to remember it while making my list. Still pretty cool that said. Always liked that one guy that was like "A man who never eats a pork bun is never a whole man" every single time I passed by him.

Nice, all my HM's made the list at least. Really liked Sleeping Dogs, the Asian setting with the combat system it has stood out strong. The structure of the game was very much to my liking. It's been under five euros on Store, the Definitive Edition, for ages and I've been contemplating many times to double dip now several years later.

Sleeping Dogs is one of those kinds of games you didn't really see much of at the time in terms of story arc and ESPECIALLY its setting. Also, Square publishing it felt out of nowhere to me because I still viewed them as dealing in RPGs at the time, so this was the first game that introduced me to the concept Square is more than a developer.

While not my kind of game, this game is always tied with Watch Dogs to me only because I had a friend who, when I was trying to explain Watch Dogs' E3 reveal, was wholly convinced I was talking about this. Imagine my laughter when he bought this because he wasn't listening completely to me talking about hacking in Chicago when he got hanging in China. (X-D)

In mid-90s my parents bought me a book about video games. It had lots of short descriptions and two detailed walkthroughs. One of those walkthroughs was X-Com: UFO Defense. I had no PC at that time (and of course no consoles) so I’ve never played it. But I’ve read that walkthrough again and again imagining I playing it.

Flash forward to 2012. XCOM: Enemy Unknown comes out and gets great reviews. I start playing it and it is exactly the same game I imagined playing nearly two decades ago. I had absolutely magical experience going through its campaign.

It’s #6 on my list because while this magical experience is tied to this game it has almost nothing to do with game’s qualities. It’s a great game, but I played more enjoyable 2012 games.